On PodWarp 1999, we recently discussed drawing starfields (and we will again soon). My way of doing it is pretty basic – I leave the area blank when I draw, then when the strip is scanned, cleaned up (if necessary) and colored, I blur the image, then bucket fill the area the starfield needs to go with black. (The blur leaves an outline around anything I’ve drawn, so the lines don’t just become part of the starfield.) Then I put in some white dots, sharpen the image up again (so it doesn’t look blurry, but the outline will still be there), and reduce it to the final size for uploading. Probably not the best way of doing it, but I’m used to it, and I get the results I want!

Since the podcast, we’ve had a couple people point us to this tutorial on making a starfield with Photoshop, and I’ve given it a try. (I’m using The GIMP, but the same steps work there.) It’s probably not something I’d use in the actual strip, but the results do look nice!

Today’s first bonus, which I’m sure will come as no surprise, is a starfield picture (with the out-of-gas alien in it, too) – and the second, which has nothing to do with starfields, but does have something to do with the title of this blog post, is a bad translation of today’s strip.